


The Aged R

by MrProphet



Category: Jeeves - P. G. Wodehouse
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-04-23
Updated: 2017-04-23
Packaged: 2018-10-22 23:37:16
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,864
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/10707522
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/MrProphet/pseuds/MrProphet





	The Aged R

Have I told you about my nephew, Bertram Wilberforce Wooster? He’s a blister and a buffoon and a shocking coward, always willing to set aside honour, moral duty and filial piety over a little matter of legal niceties or a modest threat to life, limb or liberty. Nonetheless, he is my favourite and most useful nephew, for as little as that is saying when the alternatives are the ghastly Thos – son of my sister Agatha, the one who dines on virgin’s blood and sucks lemons to sweeten her temperament – and Clarence and Eustace, our bad-will ambassadors to the Dark Continent.

Bertie is a man of many advantages. The death of my brother Willoughby has left him of independent means and so he never asks for money, which is just as well as I have very little and poor Tom, although he has some, aches to part with even a single penny in much the manner in which a foie gras goose resents the reclamation of its liver by the one who has invested so much in its cultivation. He also commands the use of the most excellent brain in England; not his own, of course, which could most usefully be employed as ballast by the shipping industry, but that of his valet, Jeeves.

I say that Bertie ‘commands’ the use of Jeeves’ brain. Well, the honest truth is that Jeeves is thoroughly his own man and that Bertie is more or less Jeeves’ own man as well, but that he exercises his magnificent intellect primarily to the advantage of his master-in-name can not be doubted and all attempts to prise him from Bertie’s side have failed so utterly that one can hardly help reflecting that some inexplicable fondness must have swayed that impeccable mind to develop a largely unwarranted sense of deep and abiding loyalty towards the blister.

Not that I can afford to criticise too strongly on those grounds. I am after all somewhat attached to said blister myself, perhaps because he reminds me so much of myself in my younger days. I don’t mean, naturally, that I was a lissom young buck about town, but I can not deny that I had my share of scrapes when I was a young debutante. And he is most certainly devoted to me, even if his lack of spine sometimes hides the fact. Just take the scrape that he scraped through on my behalf last week as your evidence.

*

The way it came out was this. I’d suffered a slight embarrassment at the whist table, to the tune of some fifty or a hundred pounds and, as I lack a little in personal funds, required of my husband some financial reinvigoration if I was not to be forced to renege on some other small matters. As ever, Tom was reluctant to make free with the readies, and so I turned for aid to Jeeves and invited Bertie to stay at Brinkley Court.

The blister telegrammed to say that he would arrive in the early afternoon, with Jeeves coming ahead by train with the luggage. This suited me as it was always best to present Bertie with a fait accompli in these instances, lest he should be tempted to try to solve the problem himself. As it happened, I already had some notion of what needed to be done, but I chose to put my faith in Jeeves and set the problem to him as soon as he arrived.

Jeeves’ prodigious brow creased in thought. “A most delicate problem, Mrs Travers,” he agreed.

“Any thoughts in that marvellous brain of yours?”

“A great many, but I fear that definite plans are slow in coming. It might assist me if you were able to furnish me with some information regarding Mr Travers’ current wants and needs? In the past it has proven most efficacious to identify an objet d’art that Mr Travers wished to add to his collection and smooth the road to its acquisition.”

“Well I remember,” I assured him, “and I have a notion that something of the sort might be accomplished. We have another guest at present, a girl called Hesther Mortby. Her late father – a great friend of Tom’s – left everything he owned to her, including a ruinously expensive house and a fine collection of silver. I know that Tom would like to acquire the collection, and she needs the money to pay the bills on her place. The only problem is that she retains some scrules about simply selling her father’s legacy and that parting with more money seems unlikely to increase Mr Travers’ generosity of spirit.”

“I understand the dilemma entirely, Mrs Travers,” Jeeves assured me. “If I might suggest, it may prove more effective for you to take some visible action to reduce the asking price of the collection than to secure an expensive sale in the first place.”

“Quite so, Jeeves, but how? What is the method to be employed?”

“If you will pardon what may appear to be prevarication, I believe that I will be more able to advise you once I have made some preliminary enquiries regarding Miss Mortby.”

“Then sally forth, Jeeves,” I commanded. “Go hence and enquire.”

“I shall endeavour to present you with a workable plan by teatime,” he assured me, and then he shimmered out in that way he does, rather like a Cheshire Cat in his departure, except that he left behind a faint odour of efficiency in place of a smile.

*

Despite Bertie’s promise of an early afternoon arrival, it was somewhat after three when he finally found his way to the parlour where I was reading. He wore the bemused expression of a fish suddenly attempting to adapt to the harsh realities of the slab and his mouth seemed to have come loose at the hinges.

“What ho, Bertie,” I called in greeting. “Do stop goggling and sit down, before Dr Chiddenham comes and takes you away for a case study in nervous disorders.”

“What? Oh, righto Aged R. Ah, what ho yourself and all that. I say, speaking of nervous disorders, you don’t happen to have any loonies staying here at the moment, do you?”

“Not at the moment, no. Present company excepted.”

“Ah.”

“Why do you ask, Bertie?”

“Oh, just hoping, you know?”

“No, Bertie, I do not know. I am not sufficiently conversant in fat-head to understand you.”

“Well, it’s like this. I met this girl on the way in from the driveway; dashed pretty young thing, but not much more than a girl and all gushy about… well about everything, really. Not soppy, exactly, just a little dashed overkeen.”

“Hesther Mortby,” I replied. “If you’ve offended her, you dashed…” I scrabbled for the worst word I could find, which at that moment was: “ _Wooster_ …”

“Steady on, old thing,” Bertie protested. “I don’t think I was at all offensive. In fact, ah, quite the opposite.”

“The opposite? Talk sense, Bertie dear. I feel one of my headaches coming on.”

“Well, that is to say, we took a bit of a turn around the garden, with me being all charm and smiles and her all ‘gosh’ and ‘did you ever’ about the flowers and the rabbits and those ornamental carp you have in the little pond, and suddenly, out of nowhere, she ups and tells me that I’m a dear heart and she accepts me unreservedly.”

“She accepts what unreservedly?” I asked, little less confused.

“Well, me,” he explained sheepishly. “Apparently we’re… going to be married.”

“You?”

“Me.”

“And Hesther Mortby?”

“That’s the girl.”

“Bertie?”

“Yes, Aunt Dahlia?”

“You are a fat head of the first water. That girl has one of the finest collections of silver plate in the country and Tom wants it. She was all set to sell it – for a tidy sum of course – and now she’ll want to keep it to eat the wedding breakfast off.”

“But dash it, Aunt Dahlia…”

“Don’t you say dash it to me, when you’ve blundered on such a monumental scale. What on Earth possessed you to propose to the girl?”

“Well… as far as I can recall, I didn’t,” he offered weakly.

“Oh, don’t be ridiculous. How can the girl have accepted you if you didn’t propose?”

We were interrupted by a soft cough from the doorway. “Excuse me, Mrs Travers, Mr Wooster; perhaps I might be able to shed a little light on this matter.”

“Oh, indeed,” Bertie groused. “I suppose I should not be surprised to find you embroiled in conspiracy against me. Well, Jeeves; shed away.”

Jeeves coughed again. “Miss Mortby has, since her father’s death, been the recipient of no small attention from a succession of young gentlemen about town, most of whom imagine her fortunes to be considerably greater than they are. Miss Mortby has received these amatory advances with a somewhat regrettable enthusiasm.”

“Well,  _that_  doesn’t surprise me,” Bertie assured us. “Regrettable enthusiasm seems pretty much to be her stock in trade.”

“Indeed, sir, but o great has been her enthusiasm in this regard that she has succeeded in contracting three engagements since this year’s Goodwood.”

“She seems a very industrious young lady,” I noted, “although I dare say she may encounter some slight difficulty in the mater of scheduling.”

“Indeed not, Mrs Travers,” Jeeves assured me. “It appears that Miss Mortby’s three fiancés have all broken off the engagement in the face of her excessive zeal and ardour, following which she has secured a tidy sum from each in return for an undertaking not to bring an action for breach of promise, nor to seek any form of publicity regarding the matter.”

Bertie was clearly as taken aback by this news as I was. “She’s a confidence trickster?” he asked. “Like old Soapie Sid?”

“No indeed, sir,” Jeeves replied. “Miss Mortby’s romantic aspirations are quite genuine.”

“And the money and all that? The breach of promise business?”

“Heaven hath not a rage like love to hatred turned,” Jeeves reminded us.

“And now this fat-head has managed to get himself affianced to this serial fiancée?” I asked, aghast. “Bertie, you utter ass. I wanted you to sweeten this girl to sell her silver, not bring the name of Wooster into disrepute.”

“Now dash it all, Aunt Dahlia! I did nothing to encourage this eager young filly. She didn’t seem to need much egging on at all, just jumped the starters gun and presented yours truly with an accepted proposal as a sort of fait accompli. Dashed if I know how it happened.”

Jeeves coughed. “Again, sir, I may be able to offer some explanation. Miss Mortby happened to mention this morning that she had been the recipient of a number of letters of a highly emotional nature, including several proposals of marriage. While all seventeen of these missives were penned by the same hand, none had been signed.

“Alas, sir, I did mention your arrival to Miss Mortby soon after this and I may also have commented that the handwriting on the letter which arrived today with a London postmark bore a certain similarity to your own. It may be that I have inadvertently given Miss Mortby the impression that  _you_  are her secret admirer.”

Bertie bridled at this. “Inadvertently my foot,” he declared. “Jeeves, I suspect you of connivance.”

“I regret that my indiscretion appears to have bred such distrust between us, sir, and shall of course endeavour to make amends.”

“Yes you bally well shall,” Bertie said, with that brawn-bonced assertiveness that cuts so much mustard with the bevy of school chums and college pals whose own advanced level of evolutionary collapse causes them to regard my nephew as the fount of all knowledge. “You shall toddle off this moment and inform Miss Mortby that you were mistaken.”

“With regret, sir, I must inform your that I do not believe such a course of action to be advisable. Miss Mortby appears quite convinced that you are her secret admirer and your own failure to question her acceptance of a proposal that you had no knowledge of making will have cemented that in her mind.”

“Then  _I_  will explain the mistake.”

“Denial and rejection will likely only strengthen to feelings of amore in her maiden breast. She has previously travelled as far as Norway in pursuit of a reluctant swain, only to return alone and several hundred pounds better off.”

“What if I were to forbid the match?” I asked.

“Miss Mortby is a great admirer of the work of Rosie M. Banks.”

“Oh,” Bertie said. “Well that scotches that.”

“Does it?”

“Rosie M. Banks, you may recall, is now Mrs Bingo Little, and a more rabid proponent of perseverance in the face of familial resistance you will not find.” Bertie frowned. “No, obstacles will be as hurrahs to this girl.”

“Indeed, sir,” Jeeves agreed. “Therefore, I may perhaps propose a different stratagem.”

“Propose away,” Bertie allowed. “To some men of my age, the thought of a pretty seventeen year old girl braving hell and high water to be with him might appeal, but experience has shown me that if ever I am to marry it should be to a sensible girl of my own years, who walks a fine line between flowery romance and the authoritarian fervour of the parade ground.”

“Very good, sir. However, what I would suggest is that you keep such reservations entirely to yourself and outwardly embrace this turn of events as though it were the one thing needed to make your life complete.”

Bertie frowned. “I don’t follow you,” he admitted.

“I must confess, Jeeves,” I added, “I find myself at a loss as well.”

“Miss Mortby possesses all the vigour and enthusiasm of the huntress Atremis in pursuit of her prey,” Jeeves explained. “Such a girl, as you so rightly note, not only thrives on the obstacles in her path, she craves such difficulties as the spice in an amorous relationship.”

“You mean… She  _wants_  people to try to stop her marrying me?”

“Indeed, sir. For Miss Mortby it is the chase that fascinates, and not the quarry. If you were to present yourself as too easy a quarry; to appear not only willing, but eager to enter into a state of matrimony, she would very likely find that the prospect began to pall considerably, especially if you were to exceed her in enthusiasm at every turn.”

“Excellent!” I applauded. “Well done, Jeeves. And do you think we should plant a few rumours about Bertie’s dark past?”

“I say, steady on!” Bertie protested. “I want to look a bad prospect, not a career criminal.”

“Indeed,” Jeeves agreed. “Besides, we should not want to evoke in Miss Mortby the reforming zeal of the wife of good influence. That is a role she would never turn down. Instead, I believe she should think Mr Wooster the perfect husband: nurturing, protecting, even controlling. The phrase ‘ivory tower’ would be one more calculated to unnerve Miss Mortby than ‘Bluebeard’s cavern’.”

“But how does this help  _me_?” I wondered. “Even if Bertie is extracted from the girl’s clutches, how does it help us to persuade her to hand over the silver for a song?”

“Mr Wooster is, as of this moment, madly infatuated with Miss Mortby,” Jeeves reminded us.

“Oh, rather,” Bertie agreed, without much enthusiasm.

“When the time comes that she wishes to end the engagement, he will of course be unwilling to do so without a struggle.”

“I will? I mean, I will. What true man would loose his hold on such a prize while there was breath in his lungs?”

“That’s good,” I told him. “Now try it without rolling your eyes.”

“Consequently, it will fall to Mrs Travers to extricate the girl from this entanglement without harm to her reputation, a favour which Mrs Travers might well deem to be repaid by the lowering of the asking price for her father’s collection.”

“Jeeves,” I said, “you are a marvel. Isn’t he a marvel, Bertie?”

“I shall join you in that sentiment when this engagement is broken, and not a moment before,” Bertie replied. He was, I feel, a trifle terse, although to his credit he  _did_  express similar feelings once the engagement was duly called off.  
And Bertie was an absolute trouper throughout the whole thing, throwing himself into the role of devoted admirer like a man born to the role. He explained that he based his characterisation on a lifelong study of his over-amorous school chum, Bingo Little – he of the Rosie M. Banks marriage – and it really was a corker. Hesther Mortby was pleading with me to call him off in less than three days and she dropped her asking price by fifty percent she was so grateful.

Bertie, the devastated swain, had to go away to recover himself of course, but he was back within the week. And if you still don’t believe that Jeeves has the finest brain on the planet, just wait until you hear what he came up with when we found that it was my own son, Bonzo, who’d been writing those love letters to Miss Mortby and intended to elope with her to the Outer Hebrides!


End file.
